


The Invention of Fire

by sifuamelia



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Angst and Feels, Denial of Feelings, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Established Relationship, Feelings Realization, Implied Relationships, Learning Disabilities, Multi, Mutual Pining, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-07 23:24:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11634111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sifuamelia/pseuds/sifuamelia
Summary: Artemis Crock bans headphones from the library at Harbor High, and AP Chem teacher Wally West isn't having it. Things get REALLY out of hand, though, when a video of their latest conflict is posted to YouTube and begins to rack up hundreds of thousands of hits, causing #SexualTensionTeachers to start trending online.To save face, the school administration decides that the two are going to have to complete a special anti-bullying project together... or ELSE. Wally's 200% sure that it's Artemis who's the root of all evil......but it turns out that she might not be so bad after all.





	The Invention of Fire

It all started with a dumb rule and an absolute demon. The dumb rule was about headphones; the absolute demon was Artemis Crock.

Artemis Crock. Stuffed-up, stick-in-the-mud, self-imposed-overlord-of-the-school-library-plus-the-rights-to-the-first-floor-central-wing-bathroom-pass Artemis Crock.

Well, that was what _Wally_  thought of her as, anyway. Everybody else at Harbor High School referred to her as “Crock.”

She wasn’t “Ms. Crock” to the students, or “Artemis” to her colleagues. To the entire school, she was simply “Crock.” And she was perfectly fine with it, too.

Or, at least, she _seemed_  to be perfectly fine with it. Wally had almost immediately noticed that Artemis didn’t show much in the way of emotions. Except for her blatant stinginess with the first floor, central wing bathroom pass… although that wasn't really an emotion, he guessed.

But when it came to Artemis Crock, he never felt particularly generous with his acquiescences. She always just  _had_ to _better_ , didn't she? Had to better Wally. And how did she better Wally best?

By not caring one damn bit.

Unfortunately, Wally cared a little _too_ much. He had his reasons. But those reasons... _well_.

Those reasons were why the trouble _really_ began.

 

* * *

 

“Blasphemous, I tell you! Blasphemous!”

It was nearly 2:00 PM in the teacher’s lounge, and Wally West had just finished up with seventh period. His day was over (thank the lord almighty), but he was still muttering under his breath as he waited for the staff Keurig to spit out his crappy little pot of impressively weak coffee. His vague accusations of blasphemes were mostly aimed in the direction of the Keurig, but he knew that Conner Kent and Dick Grayson — his college-roommates-turned-co-workers — could hear him. And if they could hear him, then maybe,  _juuuuust_  maybe, they’d pay attention to him.

From their spot at the rickety little table that served as the prime place for Harbor High's teachers to eat hot food and spread hot gossip, Dick took the bait (albeit barely). “What now?” he asked, acknowledging Wally, but his voice was bored, and his nose was still stuck in the middle of a lesson plan, digging through his freakishly enormous comp sci textbook as he went along chicken scratching out some student learning goals (the kind that would probably be tossed out the window a mere thirty seconds in anyway, because teaching high schoolers meant that  _nothing_ got done like you wanted it to, _ever_ ). His glasses were just visible over the rim of the book's pages upon pages of Python code, and they were opaque in the reflection of the industrial-level bright lights overhead.

“Even if we were miles apart, I’m pretty sure I’d still be able to hear you grinding your teeth.”

Wally immediately whirled around to face Dick at the table. He'd finally snared somebody with his ranting grasp!

“Crock—" he began, with a dramatic flourish of his hand—

“Not _again_ ,” Conner interrupted tiredly around his overstuffed sub. His wide-open mouth was currently full of bacon, lettuce, and tomato, so it sounded more like, “Naf _awen_ ,” but Wally knew what the other man meant. After all, he’d known the guy since they themselves had attended this dump of a high school.

Sometimes, Wally wanted to kick himself in a not-so-decent place for returning to work there. As a student, it'd been a total hellhole. And remarkably enough, as a teacher, despite being past all of the angsty bullshit that came along with teenager-hood, it was _still_ a hellhole. Maybe it was because even though he was technically above all of that angsty bullshit, it still somehow seemed to find him, no matter how far under his desk he hid from it. And boy, had he tried _that_.

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Wally demanded of Conner, utterly indignant.

“N-Nothing.” Conner swallowed an impressive lump of sub — Wally watched it go down his throat with a kind of fascinated disgust. He could feel his eyebrows narrowing into a sharp _V_ , and he knew that the other teacher was watching him carefully, because he took another big gulp.

“I mean, it's just, you know… C’m _on_ , dude.” Conner tried for a casual shrug, his massive, bulked-up shoulders straining through his black t-shirt. Parents usually assumed that Conner, with his hulking stature, was the school’s P.E. teacher, but the robotics lab below their feet (basement floor, left wing) was his _actual_ classroom.

“It’s just, like, you’re more obsessed with Crock than Harry was obsessed with Malfoy in _The Half-Blood Prince_.”

“Accurate,” Dick confirmed, still not taking his eyes off of his book despite Wally’s incoherent spluttering. “That’s _definitely_ accurate.”

“Opposite of true!” he finally choked out. “ _Exact_ opposite! You both know I can’t stand even the _sight_ of that stupid ponytail—“

“Hey, guys.”

There was a very,  _very_ long pause... until, with a half-hearted wave, Conner mumbled, “H-Howdy, Crock."

Wally could only stare as Dick _finally_ put down his textbook. He didn’t look the least bit fazed by Artemis's sudden appearance, though — in fact, he looked rather entertained, as only Dick could be when Wally's sanity _and_ self-esteem were simultaneously on the line. Currently both in high danger of falling straight off of that line, in fact.

“What’s up, Crock?” the computer science teacher asked, voice casual but mouth smirking.

Artemis’s eyes were so dark that they were almost black. But sometimes, under certain lights, Wally could’ve sworn that they had a hint of yellow to them. In the moment, though, they were just as flat as his disappointing little pot of coffee.

“Not much,” the school librarian replied casually. She crossed the room, opened the staff fridge, and withdrew a paper bag full of mysterious sustenance. It probably contained something just as inaccessibly pretentious as she was, like a kombucha-drenched avocado. Over gluten-free toast.

Was that even a thing? It was probably a thing. Wally was pretty sure that he'd seen the exact ingredients on sale at the _way_ overpriced Whole Foods behind his apartment building.

But then, just as suddenly as she'd entered into their lives, Artemis was leaving. “Later,” she called over her shoulder, her voice rasping on the very last syllable. And even after the door to the teacher's room had closed behind her, Wally was still staring.

“So, what exactly did she do to you _this_ time?” he heard Dick ask from somewhere far away. There was a _definite_  smugness coloring his friend's voice.

“It's an unspeakable injustice—!“ Wally began at hiss-level, but then, with a burst of static that was sharply painful to the ear—

“West to the office, Mr. West to the front office,” came a voice from over the intercom overhead. It sounded _incredibly_ bored — who in their right mind had let that girl with the mess of pigtails and a myriad of unorthodox piercings on the mic system again? Couldn't they pick somebody with even, like, a _milli-speck_ more enthusiasm to do the announcements for once? The bar was so low—!

Christ on a bike. He was sounding a helluva lot like his mom right now, wasn't he?

“Yikes,” commented Conner, triumphantly swallowing the very last bit of his massive sandwich.

“You’re in _trooouuuble_ ,” Dick practically sang, finally slamming his textbook closed with a look of unbridled glee.

Wally was both parts "Confused Math Lady" and "Arthur's Fist" (two of those meme things that his students were always yelling at each other about) as he stalked his way out of the teacher’s lounge, Dick’s unsympathetic chuckles following him down the hallway, all of the way toward the principal’s office.

 

* * *

 

“Subterfuge just isn’t a good look, Wally,” the front office’s administrative secretary explained to him, his tone verging on patronizing. Mr. Logan had curiously round, almost bulging eyes, to the point where he looked quite amphibious (and this wasn't just a Wally thing — he had Conner and Dick in on the whole animal-mutant-crossbreeding-conspiracy-theory-thing, too). And even though he was all up and occupied with wagging an unnecessary pointer finger at Wally, those froggy eyes of his never blinked once.

“What would _you_ know about cool, Logan?" Wally countered, somewhat petulantly. "You’re the antithesis of hip.”

“You’re _both_  the antithesis of hip,” confirmed Pigtails Girl — Wally’s earlier hypothesis about the voice over the intercom had been proven correct, although he was still unsure as to why she was lurking in the school's office — as she popped her bubblegum. She then proceeded to spin herself around in a lazy circle atop the desk chair that she had situated on the other end of Logan's desk.

Who _was_ she, anyway? A student? A volunteer? She looked _way_ too young to be a graduate...

Wally just shrugged. He wasn’t about to get into an argument with a sullen sixteen year-old, because he’d been teaching long enough to know that in _that_ kind of fight, the kid _always_ won. As much as hated to admit it, they were _so_ much more creative with their insults, borderline third-degree burns that would leave him suffering long into the meaningless abyss of the hours past midnight as he stared up at his cracked bedroom ceiling, cursed with the fate of finally coming up with a sick retaliation comeback to throw down in response...

...but far too many minutes too late for it to have any effect.

“And besides, it wasn’t 'subterfuge,' man,” he continued, countering Logan's holier-than-thou advice. “There wasn’t any, like, deceitfulness involved!”

“Just an obscenities-riddled shouting match in front of a bunch of the kiddos, from what I’ve heard,” Logan reminded him, with an impressive sniff to boot. 

Pigtails Girl actually cracked a smile at that one. She seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but then stopped herself.

Wally could feel his imaginary Arthur’s Fist clenching. “Hey, now, hold the fu—“

“ _He-llo_ , Mr. West,” interrupted a smooth voice from the arched doorway behind Logan’s desk.

Wally's eye twitched a little as he slowly but surely looked up to see the principal’s face. Beneath her glamorous cascade of icy-blond hair, she didn’t look particularly pleased.

“O-Oh, h-hey there, Dr. Lance—!“

“Why don’t you come inside.”

It wasn't a question. Dinah Lance never asked questions.

 

* * *

 

“You and Artemis need to try to bury the hatchet, Wally,” Oliver Queen said to him gently. The vice principal was the one exception to the “Crock” rule — after all, they were (distant?) family, and referring to his niece (cousin?) that way would’ve been kind of strange.

Despite their relations, though, Oliver had never been one for biases in the workplace. The man treated everybody with a ridiculously long leash of benefit-of-the-doubt, plus his own disgustingly unconditional brand of egalitarianism. Dinah, however…

She had a different approach when it came to Wally and Artemis’s little power struggle.

“You need to stop it with all of this, this _nonsense_ , Mr. West!” she practically demanded, her pale fist coming down on her desk with a surprisingly resounding _whack_ for something so slender.

Oliver, who was sitting next to her, coughed as Wally slouched down even further into his chair on their opposite side. Dinah was actually a pretty great boss, but she could be downright scary when she wanted to be, and despite all of his blustering, Wally actually cared about his job. So he was about to respond with a resigned “I know, I know,” when he suddenly remembered—

“Hey, wait a minute, it’s Crock’s nonsense, too!“

“ _Ms. Crock_ didn’t curse at you in front of an entire room of my students,” the principal countered, her stormy eyes flashing all kinds of lightning and thunder. “That was all _you_ , Mr. West. And it was _incredibly_ inappropriate!”

“Oh, okay, I see, I see.” Wally stuck his hands out in front of himself like a shield. An ineffective shield — Dinah’s glare was truly like a storm cloud of inescapable, impending doom. “So _that’s_ how Ponytail’s playing the game this time around. Did that little bookworm tattle on me?“

“No.” Dinah leaned back slightly, crossing her deceptively skinny arms over the long lapels of her sleek blazer. “And as usual, you’re missing the point."

Despite the fact that his ass was currently on the line, Wally couldn't hold back a disbelieving snort. And, of course, Dr. Lance didn't look any more pleased as a result. She leaned forward, then, adding, "But if you _really_ want to know, I didn’t hear a word of it from Ms. Crock.”

Wally didn’t quite believe her. “So then how did you—?“

Oliver frowned at the both of them. “Dinah, why don’t we just have Megan over in guidance do a mediation between them or something? Have them talk things out with her, or—”

“I wanna know how you found out,” Wally repeated. He _knew_ that he was being childish, as unprofessional as Dr. Lance was calling him out for. But in that very moment, he didn’t care one bit.

He needed all of the dirt on Artemis Crock that he could get.

Naturally, though, his request fell on deaf ears. “We’ve already tried something similar,” Dinah sighed heavily. “But they’re both just so _stubborn_ , Ollie!”

 _That_ was enough to give Wally pause. Had the principal just called her veep by his _nickname_? Even though they'd been working very closely together for as long as Wally had been teaching at Harbor High, the ever-proper principal had always referred to Oliver as “Mr. Queen,” or, in her most casual of moments, “Oliver.”

Both parties involved seemed to notice Wally's growing smirk, though, because the principal quickly covered her tracks with—

“The final bell’s about to ring, and I know you've got bus duty on Wednesdays, Mr. West." Her eyes were strangely tight. Just like Pigtails Girl from the front office, she looked as if she had more to say, but had thought better of it and shut herself up all stiff-like. "We'll settle this tomorrow."

“Uh- _huh_ ,” Wally responded, his smirk spreading across his face like a plague across medieval Europe.

“Have a good afternoon,” she said with her own imperious brand of finality, but it came off more like the suggestion of a threat than a polite form of dismissal.

 

* * *

 

Wally was just about to finish packing up his absolute _mountain_ of ungraded lab reports when his cell phone suddenly blasted to life, a string of _pings_ bleeping their way through his silent classroom. He glanced over at his desk — his roommate group chat with Conner and Dick was _literally_ blowing up.

He set down his bag and clicked on their Discord server, opening up the conversation ("Da 3 b3st r00m13s any1 c0uld hav3!!!") to see—

 

 **Nightwing:** Can’t believe that we now have a real live celeb living in our humble home!

 

 **Superboy:** …The Rock? John Cena?

 **Superboy** **:** Please say that John Cena's moving in with us.

 **Superboy:** He has a cool theme song AND he can (probably) cover our entire rent!

 

 **Nightwing:** This better make it to the evening news.

 **Nightwing:** Local channel six, at least.

 

 **Superboy:** Seriously  **@Nightwing**  what are you going on about?

 

Enough was enough — Dick's taunts were nearly pushing him off of the a razor-thin edge that he was already walking, and it was high time that Wally figured out exactly what was going on.

 

 **KidFlash:**  Yeah, what's going on here, exactly?

 

 **Nightwing:** Oh, hey there, **@KidFlash**  a.k.a. Mr. Potential-Class-Action-Lawsuit!

 

_What the fu—?!_

Wally quickly hammered out a most eloquent response—

 

 **KidFlash:**  UM.

 **KidFlash:** Say what, now?

 

For an agonizingly long moment, gray dots were marching their way across his phone’s screen as Dick typed, and typed, _and typed_ —

 

 **Nightwing:** You’re trending online, dude!

 

 **Superboy:**  What!

 

 **Nightwing:** Yeah.

 **Nightwing:** #SexualTensionTeachers

 **Nightwing:** It’s EVERYWHERE.

 **Nightwing:** The video got taken down almost immediately after it was posted, though, so you can at least feel good about that!

 

Wally just stared down at his screen, dumbfounded.

Trending?

A hashtag?

A _video_?

What video—?!

 

 **Superboy:**  Video? What video?

 

  **Nightwing:** Apparently, somebody filmed Wally and Crock’s little library tiff today…

 **Nightwing:** ...and posted it on YouTube.

 **Nightwing:** Title was "when r my teachers finally gonna boink??!!?"

 

 **Superboy:** Oh.

 **Superboy:** Hot.

 **Superboy:** DAMN.

 **Superboy:**  Wait, but...

 **Superboy:**  How do you know that it was taken down?

 

 **Nightwing:** Dr. Lance asked me to do it as soon as the district-level admins found out.

 **Nightwing:** LOL, pretty sure they're freaked that parents are gonna catch wind of it.

 

 **Superboy:**  Oh, my.

 

 **Nightwing:** But the damage’s already done.

 **Nightwing:**  And whoever filmed it — I couldn't quite figure that part out, unfortunately — must still have it on file, somehow.

 **Nightwing:** Damn smartphones.

 

Wally’s legs suddenly gave out, and he sank like a stone into his desk chair, staring unseeingly at his phone’s screen.

_...What have I done?_

 

 **Superboy:**  Wally, buddy...

 **Superboy:** Are you okay?

 **Superboy:**  Wally?

 

 **KidFlash:**  I'm 99.99% sure that my ass is currently grass.

 

Conner responded almost immediately, bless his heart.

 

 **Superboy:** No, don't think like that!

 **Superboy:** You're an amazing teacher!

 **Superboy:** At least, I think.

 **Superboy:** I've never actually seen you teach, so you could actually be really bad...

 **Superboy:**  But everybody slips up at one point or another!

 

 **KidFlash:** Okay, but this isn't just a little "slip up."

 **KidFlash:** Lance is gonna murder me tomorrow.

 **KidFlash:** So in this moment, a veritable threat to my mortality is far more concerning than simply losing my job.

 **KidFlash:** ...

 **KidFlash:**   **@Nightwing** whaddya think?

 

 **Nightwing:** ...

 **Nightwing:**  ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

 

 _Helpful. **Real** helpful, Dick._  Wally's heart was threatening to race its way out of his chest, bursting through muscle and bone and skin until he collapsed even further, until he exploded into a great big pile of abso-fucking-lutely nothing.

So his bosses knew _exactly_ what had gone down in the library that afternoon, and now it wasn't just the students who'd been using the space for fifth period study hall who'd overheard him swearing at Douchecanoe Crock over her dumbfuck new rule — know-it-all Pigtails Girl must've seen the whole debacle unfold online, in HD and surround-sound and all of that goddamn jazz. Fan-fucking-tastic.

 _Or_ , if she'd been watching the clip _after_  Dr. Lance had recruited Dick's Dank Hacker Skillz™, through some kind of text message share? He didn't know how the kids did it, but he _did_ know that they were uncannily good at spreading things around like wildfire — gossip, mono, weed, you name it.

And apparently, #SexualTensionTeachers was their next hot commodity.

Wally buried his face in his hands as he wondered if hiding under his desk for the rest of his life would be the best option after all for facing (or _not_ facing, that sounded a helluva lot better) down his suddenly abysmal future.

The kids would laugh the whole thing off in a few weeks. The parents would be pissed, but they all liked him — so long as their special snowflakes kept scoring 5s on the AP Chem exam, they wouldn't be chomping at the bit to get him _completely_ pink-slipped. But Dinah and Oliver would probably have to send him to school district HR reconditioning or something godawful like that to appease Dr. Luthor, the district's absolute _asshole_ superintendent.

 _God_ , he hoped that they wouldn't decide to dismiss him. He didn't want to be fired. He had tenure. He was making six figures. He was transforming scrawny little lives with the knowledge that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell—!

_Does Artemis know?_

The whole time, that tiny little voice at the back of his head had been growing stronger and stronger, hungrily feeding on every other wild thought, every other frantic notion, until suddenly, it sucked the panic-stricken life out of everything else within him.

What did the school librarian think of #SexualTensionTeachers?

Of "boinking?"

If she _did_ know about it... would she even care?

 _Probably not,_  Wally thought to himself. Still, he could feel his face, his neck, his entire _being_ reddening.

"Shit," he said aloud.

Only this time, there was absolutely no one around to ask him what was up.


End file.
